No-one would ever describe Cleomenes and Dion as the most exciting roles in The Winter’s Tale. Actors dutifully agree to play them, hoping for better things to come in their careers. But they rarely do. Looking through the long list of actors who have played either of them for the Royal Shakespeare Company I find that only one, Hugh Quarshie, who played Cleomenes in , achieved those “better things,” five years later, playing Banquo, Tybalt and Arcite (in The Two Noble Kinsmen, the production that opened the Swan Theatre in Stratford-upon-Avon). Though the characters have names, they are not exactly strongly individuated: nothing here of the kind of differen-tiation that make, say, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern fun to play. It is no accident that, when Shakespeare wants to tell the story of the revelation of Perdita’s identity in Act , the gentlemen become unnamed, except for “Ruggiero” ( . . ). But there is some-thing remarkable about the language Shakespeare gives Cleomenes and Dion. Studying The Winter’s Tale at school, I was told how striking their description of the oracle at Delphi was and I had no difficulty sharing my schoolmaster’s enthusiasm for that won-derful breath of fresh air, their duologue scene, . , which blows into the claustropho-bic and imprisoning world of Leontes’ court. The play makes much of their journey, even before we see them: Leontes tells his attendants
I have dispatched in post To sacred Delphos, to Apollo’s temple, Cleomenes and Dion, whom you know
Of stuffed sufficiency. ( . . – )1
Two scenes later, a servant brings the news that “Cleomenes and Dion, / Being well arrived from Delphos, are both landed, / Hasting to th’ court” ( . . – ). In court they simply and simultaneously swear that they brought the “sealed-up oracle” and have not dared to read it: “All this we swear” ( . . ). And they say nothing more in the trial scene. We might, not unreasonably, expect them never to reappear or not to find they have anything much to do if they do come back on stage.
But it is precisely their return at the start of Act that intrigues me more now than that Delphic narration, when the play finally moves back to Sicilia and the circle begins to be completed, so far as the unalterable deaths of Mamillius and Antigonus will allow.
1. All quotations are from William Shakespeare, The Complete Works, ed. Stanley Wells et al., nd edition (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, ).
The act-division, which we assume to have been marked at the Blackfriars by music, marks the journeying back to Sicilia and . begins with Leontes’ entrance, accompa-nied by Paulina, as we might expect, as well as the double act of Cleomenes and Dion, plus some “servants.” Even if we remember the duo from half a play earlier—and we could be forgiven for having forgotten them—we might not anticipate that Cleomenes will open the dialogue:
Sir, you have done enough, and have performed A saint-like sorrow. No fault could you make Which you have not redeemed, indeed, paid down More penitence than done trespass. At the last Do as the heavens have done, forget your evil.
With them, forgive yourself. ( . . – )
My choice of phrase about an audience’s pardonable forgetfulness—“we could be forgiven for having forgotten them”—was rather heavy-handedly predictive, anticipat-ing Cleomenes’ remarkable reformulation of the conventional trope, a phrase so famil-iar as to be almost a cliché or perhaps already fully slipping over that invisible line into cliché, here avoiding that threat by turning “forgive and forget” into “forget your evil […] forgive yourself.”
This is the last and, for me, most astonishing of Shakespeare’s five uses of a form that the OED traces back to the th century Ancrene Riwle (“forget,” v. .b).2 The inter-connection of the two words will be central to Paul Ricoeur’s project,3 where he needs it to be the case that forgetting is intimately, conceptually and etymologically connected to forgiving, an intertwining that is apparent in the roots of the two verbs (OE forgietan/forgiefan). As Douwe Draaisma reminds us,
Even as a verb, “to forget” has no real autonomy. As in “forgo” or “forbid”
the prefix “for” in “forget” makes the word mean the opposite of “get.” For-getting is a derivative concept, a negation: it is what you end up with when you think about remembering and then consider its opposite.4
But his emphasis on the “for” form might make us think exactly what is the opposite of
“give” in “forgive.” As the OED traces it, the word shifts from meaning simply ‘give’
(sense ) to meaning to ‘give up’ (sense : “To give up, cease to harbour [resentment, wrath]”), before it comes to have a meaning of ‘pardon’ (senses and ). Not giving but
2. The Oxford English Dictionary, online edition, www.oed.com (accessed September ).
3. Paul Ricoeur, Memory, History, Forgetting (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, ).
4. Douwe Draaisma, Forgetting: Myths, Perils and Compensations (New Haven: Yale University Press, ), p. .
giving up, then, a position in which the balance of the two verbs would seem often to be difficult to achieve.
But in what sense can one forgive and forget, manage that delicate balance? The use of the phrase may be a request: please forgive me and forget what I’ve done. But it may be a statement of doing so: I forgive you and forget your actions. It may be compara-tively easy to forgive but such active forgetting is, in effect, a fiction. Think for a mo-ment about one of the most famous stories of Elizabeth I announcing that she has for-gotten something:
This Earle of Oxford making of his low obeisance to Queen Elizabeth hap-pened to let a Fart: at which he was so abashed that he went to Travell, yeares. At his returne the Queen welcomed him home, and sayd, my Lord I forgot the Fart.5
The comment is wry, a way of deliberately embarrassing the Earl. It is also very funny.
But I find it odd that it can be used as an example of how the Queen “could be forgiv-ing too.”6 What it is not is a statement of having forgotten anything. Quite the reverse:
it reminds us what she has remembered. And in the act of remembering the forgiving is simply a sovereign’s indifference to the original offence that sent the Earl rushing away from court.
All five of Shakespeare’s experiments with the balancing act of the two forg- words (and the concomitant evasion of the third: forge) are intriguing and well worth tracing, a superb example of the ever-increasing complexity and thoughtfulness with which Shakespeare works with a phrase. When Queen Margaret, in Henry VI, tells Warwick
“And I forgive and quite forget old faults, / And joy that thou becomest King Henry’s friend” ( . . – ), she performs forgetfulness but, as the repository, throughout this play and Richard III, of all remembering we might place a little more trust in her forgiv-ing than her forgettforgiv-ing, even though that quite must here be intended to persuade that she “fully, entirely” forgets (OED “quite,” adv. A.I. and A.I. “indicating thorough completion of an action”), rather than that much later th-century sense of “moder-ately, somewhat, rather” (OED III).
In Richard II, Richard attempts—or wishes to appear to be attempting—to make Mowbray and Bolingbroke “purge this choler without letting blood”:
Forget, forgive, conclude, and be agreed.
Our doctors say this is no month to bleed. ( . . , – )
5. John Aubrey, Brief Lives, ed. Kate Bennett, vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ), : (omitting Aubrey’s deletions).
6. See http://www.historic-uk.com/HistoryUK/HistoryofEngland/Queen-Elizabeth-I/ (ac-cessed August ).
The jingling rhyme is comic, perhaps weakly so, perhaps deliberately so; in perfor-mance, it often makes Richard’s flatterers laugh. The four imperatives suggest parallels:
forget is like forgive as conclude is like be agreed. But the pattern does not quite work:
there can be conclusion without agreement or agreement without conclusion, and there can be forgiveness without forgetting but only forgetting without forgiveness if one forgets first, a temporal sequence that verges on the impossible: how can one continue not to forgive but already have forgotten? Either way, the couplet is unconvincing.
In a fine reading of the passage, Doug Eskew suggests two structures simultaneously present: first, there is parallelism in which “conclude elaborates on forget, and be agreed elaborates on forgive,” so that forgetting is a form of limitation and forgiving as coming together; second, there is chiasmus, where “[f]orgetting […] makes for being agreeable, and forgiving is that which limits.”7 Richard is arguing that Mowbray must be forgiven and his actions forgotten over an event that Shakespeare chooses not to have dramatized (the murder of Gloucester) but in which the King’s complicity must be apparent to the audience. I see Richard’s flippancy as itself a sign that the forgive-forget duo cannot operate: can one place a limit on memory here, for the death is powerfully evoked—not least in Gregory Doran’s RSC production where the scene plays out with Gloucester’s coffin onstage with the Duchess kneeling helpless in grief beside it? The very invitation or command to forgive and forget manifests its own impossibility.
In All’s Well That Ends Well, at the start of the long final scene, the King praises Hel-ena and tells the Countess, speaking of Bertram’s actions, that “I have forgiven and forgotten all, / Though my revenges were high bent upon him / And watched the time to shoot” ( . . – ). He expands on it further, as Lafeu speaks of Helena’s “dear per-fection”:
Praising what is lost
Makes the remembrance dear. Well, call him hither.
We are reconciled, and the first view shall kill All repetition. Let him not ask our pardon.
The nature of his great offence is dead, And deeper than oblivion we do bury
Th’incensing relics of it. ( . . – )
Dr Johnson did not approve of the King’s decision here: “Decency required that Ber-tram’s double crime of cruelty and disobedience joined likewise with some hypocrisy, should raise more resentment; and that though his mother might easily forgive him, his king should more pertinaciously vindicate his own authority and Helen’s merit.”8 But
7. Doug Eskew, “Richard II and the Unforgetting Messiah,” Exemplaria : ( ), – , pp. – .
8. Walter Raleigh, ed., Johnson on Shakespeare (London: Oxford University Press, ), p.
.
the King both is and is not announcing the end of the punishment of Bertram’s
“offence,” since while the King can perform an act of oblivion, that is not the same thing as eliminating the memories, “Th’incensing relics,” which will not disappear on command. “Relics” is a complex word here, covering a number of parts of OED’s definitions for the period: it must retain part of the Catholic sense of pieces of a saint that are holy and deserving of veneration (OED, n. .a), also “A precious or valuable object […] or beloved person” ( .c), “Something kept as a remembrance, souvenir, or memorial” ( .d), “That which remains or is left behind, esp. after destruction” ( .a), and “The remains of a person” ( .a). Helena’s corpse, something to be praised and venerated and remembered, cannot be placed neatly in a space paradoxically offered as
“deeper than oblivion” (for what can be deeper than oblivion?). The time-honoured phrase—“forgiven and forgotten”—seems to deny its own accomplishment. As Jonas Barish points out, in the King’s lines,
“forgetting” has little to do with actual failure of memory. The King remem-bers well enough—no doubt painfully, stingingly—how Bertram has misbe-haved, yet he proposes to proceed as if he has truly forgotten […] oblivion thus signalling not a literal loss of remembrance so much as the deliberate casting out of a long-smouldering anger.9
King Lear uses forgive four times: the blinded Gloucester asking the “Kind gods” to
“forgive me that, and prosper” Edgar ( . . ); Lear planning life with Cordelia in pris-on, “When thou dost ask me blessing, I’ll kneel down, / And ask of thee forgiveness”
( . . – ); Edmund, later in the same scene, saying to his opponent, as yet uniden-tified, “If thou’rt noble, / I do forgive thee” ( . . – ); and, most powerfully and movingly, Lear earlier to Cordelia, at the end of their scene of reconnection to each other, ‘‘Pray you now, forget / And forgive. I am old and foolish” ( . . – ). As so often in this play, the sheer simplicity of the language intensifies the emotional effect that the audience receives through it. The words could not be much plainer: a common invocation of request, an almost clichéd phrase, a moment of self-identification. Like, say, Edgar’s “I would not take this from report; it is, / And my heart breaks at it”
( . . – ) or, in . , Cordelia’s “And so I am, I am” or “No cause, no cause” ( , ), Shakespeare invests an affirmative statement or, in Lear’s case, a request with over-whelming force. Here there are no awkward overtones to “forget / And forgive,” except, just possibly, in the inversion of the verbs—all OED’s early examples are “forgive and forget.”
So, finally, back to The Winter’s Tale and Cleomenes’ “Do as the heavens have done, forget your evil. / With them, forgive yourself.” And then Leontes’ response:
9. Jonas Barish, “Remembering and Forgetting in Shakespeare,” in Elizabethan Theatre, eds.
R. B. Parker and S. P. Zitner (Newark: University of Delaware Press, ), pp. – ; p. .
Whilst I remember Her, and her virtues I cannot forget My blemishes in them, and so still think of
The wrong I did myself. ( – )
Cleomenes’ separation of the terms of the phrase is especially provocative: on the one hand, there is the evil of the actions which warrants forgetting; on the other, there is the self that can be forgiven, an act of self-forgiveness. Barish suggests that “remembrance here constitutes a form of piety and Leontes’ stubborn refusal to forget becomes the badge of an authentic conversion”10 but I find the word “blemishes” undercuts that.
Cleomenes’ strong phrase “your evil”—think of Kent to Lear: “I’ll tell thee thou dost evil” ( . . ), the aggression magnified by the use of “thou” from subject to mon-arch—is modified and ameliorated by Leontes’ word, for “blemish” means here, as OED puts it (n. fig.), “A moral defect or stain; a flaw, fault, blot, slur,” the defect suggesting something less powerful, less absolute than “evil.” OED indeed quotes under this sense one of the two earlier uses of the word in the play, Leontes’ promise to Ca-millo, “I’ll give no blemish to her honour, none” ( . . ), though Paulina will use the word as a verb to describe Mamillius’ reaction to Leontes doing exactly what he has promised not to do:
the young prince, whose honourable thoughts—
Thoughts high for one so tender—cleft the heart That could conceive a gross and foolish sire
Blemished his gracious dam. ( . . – )
Here the word carries a possible legal sense (OED v. .c): “To cast a slur upon, as-perse, defame, discredit, disable.” And does “the wrong I did myself” mean “the wrong I myself did” or “the wrong I did to myself”? The latter again weakens the force of Le-ontes’ state of self-understanding, hinting even at a form of self-forgiving that Cleome-nes thinks he has not yet achieved.
Yet what is also potent in the use of the phrase, unique in Shakespeare’s work, is the status of the speaker. Unlike Queen Margaret, King Richard II, the King of France or King Lear, Cleomenes is not a royal but usually defined, in editors’ lists of characters, as a lord in Leontes’ court or something similar. Like Lear and Richard, he is asking some-one else to forgive and forget and, unlike any of the others, he is asking the person to forgive himself and forget what that person has done, not to forgive someone else or forget that other person’s actions. As long as Leontes fails to act as King, it is appropri-ate for Cleomenes to take on the royal role of encouraging, even if not commanding, forgiving and forgetting. Especially when he aligns the request with divine actions, though quite how he knows what “the heavens have done” is never explained and thus
10. Barish, p. .
becomes a vulnerable analogy. And how, in any case, can the evil be forgotten other than by forgetting Mamillius, something the play tries hard but effectively fails to do?
There is here, as in the other examples, a power relationship in the use of the phrase but one that is here inverted, with the King being made to consider forgiving himself and forgetting for himself, is part of the point.
There is, in Cleomenes’ phrase, a further inversion. While forgiving oneself might be seen as desirable, forgetting oneself is something that is a mark of a failure of control—
think, for instance, of Hamlet saying to Horatio, apologetically, “But I am very sorry, good Horatio, / That to Laertes I forgot myself” ( . . – ). Self, here as much a mark of status as identity, is something that one should never forget, for it disrupts the social markers that define social behaviour. This is what the OED defines as “To lose remem-brance of one’s own station, position, or character; to lose sight of the requirements of dignity, propriety, or decorum; to behave unbecomingly” ( .b) but there are also usages OED here seems not quite to cover, as, for example, in Hamlet’s earlier comment, “Ho-ratio—or I do forget myself” ( . . ). Richard McCabe’s Hamlet (directed by Bill Alexander, Birmingham Repertory Theatre, ) was not a close friend of Horatio; he recognized him, as one might a fellow student seen at lectures or in the dining hall, though the friendship would grow across the course of the performance, as the friend-ship with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern collapsed. His Hamlet’s comment was a cour-teous touch towards someone who would like to have been noticed by the Prince. It may be embarrassment or, more often, a warm celebration of a Horatio who mattered as much to other Hamlets as self-recognition. It may also be something slightly more troubling and deeper: not to recognize his friend would be a sign of not knowing his own self, as Horatio will be a crucial part of the journey through the action for someone whose investigation of how he knows himself and how he forgets himself is central to western culture.
Again and again, but most especially in the Histories, this sense of forgetting is linked to status figures, as OED’s definition so strongly suggests. So, to take one example (OED’s earliest example of the form) when, on his return from Ireland, Richard II hears from Salisbury that the Welsh troops have left the day before, his response to Aumerle’s
“Remember who you are” is
I had forgot myself. Am I not King?
Awake, thou coward majesty, thou sleep’st!
Is not the King’s name twenty thousand names? ( . . – ) Just as forgiveness of a criminal act is a royal prerogative, so it is necessary that the for-giver does not forget him/herself. Self-forgetting would mark a failure not only of the individual but also of the hierarchies of power structures within which the individual’s status is marked. Just as Sarah Beckwith so finely shows the confessional structures that always underpin what she calls Shakespeare’s “grammar of forgiveness,” so